Canadian Customer Service Compared to U.S. Customer Service

You would think customer service would be identical north and south of the border, but it's not.  There is one fundamental difference that I run into constantly.

In the USA, if you the customer have a problem and common sense indicates that the store bends its rules or policy to make you happy, they generally will.  If not, they will certainly agree that the rule is silly and apologize profusely that they cannot take the right actions to make you satisfied.

In Canada, the RULES ARE THE RULES.  If you have a problem and the store's rules do not allow it to be solved, even though common sense says it should, you are out of luck.  Not only that, you will feel that you are causing the problem by exposing the weakness of their rule.

An example illustrates this difference:

1. I want to transfer all my stocks and ETFs from my US broker Vanguard to my new Canadian broker, RBC Direct Investments (part of Royal Bank, a huge Canadian bank).
2. This can be done by filling out a standard form.  Vanguard, like most brokers, requires that you get a special identity verification called a Medallion Stamp.  This is normally done by a US bank.
3. RBC says that they can stamp the form, which makes sense since they operate in the USA, and they are the ones receiving all these investments.
4. Long story short, RBC gives me the runaround of all their divisions (two weeks of calling and email) and finally says that they can only stamp their own form.  They cannot stamp the Vanguard form even though they know me, know what I am doing, I have lots of my money in their bank, I pay them lots of fees, and the form is almost identical to their form.  "It is a rule at the bank".  It is just a stamp saying they guarantee my identity, but they cannot do it.
5. So I call Vanguard, tell them I cannot do the transfer because I cannot get the stamp.  Even though they are losing the business, they quickly come back to me and say they will accept voice verification of my identity using their voice identification system.  They will bend the rules to lose business and RBC will not bend the rules to get more business.  This is the essence of Canadian customer service - you will get good service as long as the rules allow it, otherwise you are SOL.